Science of Logic has received less attention than his Phenomenology of Spirit, but Hegel himself took it to be his highest philosophical achievement and the backbone of his system. The present book focuses on this most difficult of Hegel's published works. Béatrice Longuenesse offers a close analysis of core issues, including discussions of what Hegel means by "dialectical logic," the role and meaning of "contradiction" in Hegel's philosophy, and Hegel's justification for the provocative statement that "what is rational is actual, what is actual is rational." She examines both Hegel's debt and his polemical reaction to Kant, and shows in great detail how his project of a "dialectical" logic can be understood only in light of its relation to Kant's "transcendental" logic. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Hegel's philosophy and its influence on contemporary philosophical discussion.

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In this collection of essays Béatrice Longuenesse considers the three aspects of Kant's philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, his moral philosophy and his aesthetic theory, under one unifying standpoint: Kant's conception of our capacity to form judgements. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world - what Kant calls the 'human point of view' - have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgements. Her discussion ranges over Kant's account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgements, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant and his thought.

N THREE ASIONS IONS I N THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, KANT TAKES credit for having finally provided the proof of the 'principle of sufficient reason' that his predecessors in German post-Leibnizian philosophy had sought in vain. They could not provide such a proof, he says, beca~lse they lacked the transcendental method of the Critique oj'Pure Reason. According to this method, one proves the truth of a synthetic a priori principle (for instance, the causal principle) by proving two things: (1) that the conditions of possibility of our experience of an object are also the conditions of possibility ($this object itself'(this is the argument Kant makes in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, in the Critique of Pure Reason); (2) that presupposing the truth of the synthetic principle under consideration (for instance, the causal principle, but also all the other 'principles of pure understanding' in the Critique ($Pure Reason) is a condition of possibility of our experience of any object, and therefore (by virtue of (l)) , of this object itself. What Kant describes as his "proof of the principle of sufficient reason" is none other than his proof, according to this n~cthod, of the causal principle in the Second Analogy of Experience, in the Critique oj'Pure Reason.' Now this claim is somewhat surprising. 111 Leibniz, and in Christian WolK-the main representative of the post-Lcibnizian school of Gcrnman philosophy discussed by Kant-the causal principle is only one of the specifications of the principle of sufficient reason. And Kant himself, in the pre-critical text that discusses this principle, distinguishes at least four types of reason, and therefore four specifications of the corresponding principle-ratio essendi (reason for be in^, that is, reason for

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